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Are not my days few? cease then, and let me alone, that I may take comfort a little, Before I go whence I shall not return, even to the land of darkness and the shadow of death; A land of darkness, as darkness itself; and of the shadow of death, without any order, and where the light is as darkness.

On YouTube today, I ran into this: http://youtu.be/6Jc61xBfcGI It’s been around for a while and I’m not going to embed it on the post, but it supposedly shows Pope Francis invoking — Lucifer? The poster is obviously implying that the pope, through his cantor, is blatantly praying to “the Anti-Christ”, and most of those commenting fall right into line with that assumption.

In case you’re not already aware of it, Lucifer is not a Biblical synonym for Satan. The word Lucifer occurs only once in older English translations of the Bible, in Isaiah 14:12:

“How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! how art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations!” (KJV)

In that sentence, the word is a metaphor for the earthly king of Babylon. In Latin, Lucifer literally means “light-bearer,’ from the root noun lux (light) and the verb fero (bear), and it refers to the morning star (the planet Venus). Jesus also was called the morning star in 2 Peter 1:19. The Vulgate again uses the word lucifer for that reference, and that is why, when that word lucifer is used in that ancient hymn in the video, it is completely referring to Jesus. Later Christians simply took the verse in Isaiah out of context and created a fanciful story about Lucifer as a fallen angel.